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enHow much help do rural schools in your state need?http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/education/how-much-help-do-rural-schools-your-state-need

The Rural School and Community Trust has released its "Why Rural Matters" report for 2013-2014, tracking the conditions of rural education in each of the 50 states. Using a combination of measurements, including student diversity, socioeconomic conditions and educational outcomes, the nonprofit organization categorizes in its report the overall need for support of rural education in each state.

In particular, the report highlighted the fact that rural schools, which serve 20 percent of U.S. schoolchildren, are experiencing higher growths in enrollment rates compared to non-rural schools. Rural schools also serve an increasingly diverse demographic and a growing percentage of students live in poverty, according to the report.

College grads might be having a tough time landing jobs these days, but college presidents are doing pretty well for themselves. That's according to a new survey from the Chronicle of Higher Education on executive pay at public colleges.

"Their pay seems to have been more or less impervious to the recent downturns we've seen in the economy," says Jack Stripling, lead reporter on the Chronicle's college president pay report.

The media group says the typical college president pulled in about $480,000 in total compensation in the 2012-2013 fiscal year. Nine presidents of the 256 public college leaders surveyed by the Chronicle had total compensation packages that topped $1-million. The highest-earning president was E. Gordon Gee, who ran Ohio State University during the period in question. His total compensation exceeded $6-million. Gee is now president at West Virgina University.

Such big pay packages may raise hackles at a time when schools are charging more for tuition and using cheap, adjunct faculty. Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, president emeritus at the George Washington University, says college faculty likely do need a pay bump. But he says that's a separate issue.

"You don't have to make the case that presidents are overpaid in order to make the case that faculty are underpaid," he says.

Trachtenberg argues that college presidents earn their big paychecks by bringing in lots of money in tough fundraising environments.

But Michael Dannenberg, director of higher education and education finance policy with the Education Trust, says public college presidents should have some relationship to graduation rates.

"We have pretty high compensation levels at many institutions with disturbingly low performance when it comes to student success," he says.

The Chronicle of Higher Education's survey reveals that in many cases, presidents are not the top earners at public colleges. Its analysis finds that of the public college faculty earnig more than $1-million in fiscal year 2012-2013, 70 percent were coaches.

Now that much of the grunt work in American manufacturing is done by machines, we need skilled, high-paid workers to run those machines. Specifically, workers with more math and engineering knowledge than in the past. And the manufacturing industry worries that schools aren't teaching future workers what they'll need to know.

Educators are working with industry to change that; in some cases by combining cutting-edge technology with an old-school educational concept. Some of this thinking is in action in upstate New York, on thetech-focused campus of Hudson Valley Community College. A group of high school students is huddled around teacher Darrel Ackroyd, who is showing them a 3-D printer. As the machine whirs and slices out patterns, one student wants to know if it could print out a person.

"In a plastic form, yes," Ackroyd answers.

This cracks the students up and they immediately start joking about the possibilities of "3-D selfies." But they take their tech seriously, and they pepper the teacher with thoughtful questions about speed, cost and potential uses of the technology.

Ackroyd is young, with a hipster beard and man bun. Despite his techie image, he's also a kind of a throwback to a character these students' grandparents would recognize: the high school shop teacher.

Schools are bringing back this tradition of showing students how to work with their hands, this time with a high-tech twist. Now, instead of a crappy birdhouse and a mouthful of sawdust, students get hands-on technology experience that could help them land well-paying jobs.

Ballston Spa runs the program, but students in districts from around the region are eligible. They can get college credit studying here, which saves them (and their parents) money. But the big draw is the chance to get their hands on some of the latest technology, from nanotechnology to green energy.

The program, a partnership between high school, higher education and industry, is new, so educators often have to explain the benefits of working with technology that some find strange, maybe even scary.

"It's really about creating that awareness, not only for the students, but also for the parents, so that they can have an understanding about what are these new opportunities that are going to be available for my children," Logan-King explains.

Bringing students from around the region to a well-equipped college campus gives them the chance to have experiences like the realization student Morgan Pakatar had when she first suited up to enter a nanotech lab.

"I'm just, like, I feel cool, this is awesome, this is what I wanna do," she remembers.

That's what educators and tech companies hope for from programs like this: a new generation of workers excited about the jobs of the future, with marketable skills that only hands-on learning can provide.

]]>Tue, 13 May 2014 20:28:43 GMTWhen you talk about a 'first job,' what do you mean?http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/education/when-you-talk-about-first-job-what-do-you-mean

Graduation season is upon us and many college graduates are relentlessly sending out monotonous cover letters to any and every employer out there -- everyone hoping to land their first “real job.”

But what exactly is a first “real job?” Is it an internship? Is it working as a barista to pay the bills? Is it your first entry-level position on your prospective career path?

The concept of a first “real job” can mean a lot of things nowadays, considering the fact that many new grads are starting out by applying to internships.

And that's probably because you need more than just a college education to get your first "real job”.

Take me, for example. I am an intern at Marketplace today, and when I graduated in 2013 with a bachelor's degree in political science, my big resume bullet points included: two unpaid internships, one in Los Angeles and one in D.C., experience abroad -- living in Germany, to be exact -- and some work experience as a lifeguard.

I felt I was ahead of the game. I felt I was ready for my first career-starting job.

But was I? After applying online to various entry-level positions, I quickly realized I didn't have the qualifications hiring managers believed I needed to secure a full-time position.

Most jobs I applied to required at least one or two years of experience, as opposed to my six months' worth. So I sought out another internship after graduation, and now I am working on my fourth, as a digital intern here at Marketplace. The one-year anniversary of my graduation looms ahead.

How will internship expectations pan out for the class of 2013 graduates, like myself, who have been getting on-the-job experience in order to get their first "real jobs"? We’re beginning a series of reports asking people: What did it take to get your first “real job”? And what exactly is a “real job” anyway?

As I tried to answer these questions for myself, I realized it's a bigger story. So I went to someone with expertise on the internship process: ProPublica's Project Intern intern, Casey McDermott.

“I don’t think it indicates something wrong with the hiring process. I would hope that hiring managers would be able to look at a student holistically, instead of just looking at the lines on a person's resume," says Casey McDermott. McDermott just got her first "real job" as a reporter for the New Hampshire newspaper, the Concord Monitor.

Prior to getting this latest job, McDermott traveled across the country with ProPublica, taking a closer look at the human impact of internships.

"The project we did was focused on highlighting student voices: How can we spotlight students’ stories who have been interns and how has that either helped them or hurt them or changed their view on the work force?" says McDermott.

In contrast to the survey, however, Casey attributes her success to more than just her internship experiences.

"I think it was a combination of what I learned and what I was able to communicate about my learning experiences in my internships during the application process," she says. "But it was also my experience in college. Working at my college newspaper the Daily Collegian at Penn State was also instrumental in getting me employment."

Lucky for current graduating seniors, the National Association of Colleges and Employers' Job Outlook 2014 Spring Update survey is reporting that employers plan to hire 8.6 percent more class of 2014 graduates than they hired from the Class of 2013.

How will this vary among industries? Will this benefit the computer science major more than the liberal arts major?

This series is driven by viewer response, so we want to hear from you. Tweet us, tell us on Facebook or answer in the comments section below.

At General Assembly, an education/event space in New York, 20-somethings line up to sample gourmet oatmeal with truffle oil and bacon. Representatives from the Food Network and New York Magazine’s Grub Street are on hand. The event is sponsored by the Student Intern Network, to connect college students and recent grads with people in the food media business.

Zachary Huhn, 24, founded the network to help students find those all-important internships.

“Over 60 percent of employers say that graduates are not prepared for the workforce when they graduate,” he says. “I think that students do themselves a huge disservice if they don’t go out of their way to track down and take advantage of their own internships and opportunities, because you just have to do it.”

Skyler Bouchard, a junior at New York University, has done her part. She’s racked up an impressive list of internships, at Bullett Magazine, a food website called the Daily Meal, Hearst Magazines and Entertainment Tonight.

“And now I’m at CNN,” she says.

This summer she’ll add yet another stint, at the local news channel NY1. With the exception of CNN, all of her internships have been unpaid.

Bouchard says what she learned about the business was worth it.

“If I didn’t learn any of that I wouldn’t even be able to get a paying job, so I think it all is a stepping stone to helping you get somewhere bigger,” she says.

The media business has long been a bastion of the unpaid internship, but thanks to a wave of lawsuits, maybe not for much longer. Magazine company Condé Nast—home of Vogue and the New Yorker—just settled a case. Rather than pay its interns minimum wage, the company shut the program down. Other companies have started paying, or even given their interns raises.

“I thought that it was always a little bit unfair that the media businesses or some of the higher profile internship opportunities were only available to folks whose parents could support them over the summer,” says Geoff Bartakovics, CEO of TastingTable.com, an email magazine about food and wine.

Bartakovics, who moved out of his parents’ home at the age of 16, says he could not have afforded to live in New York City and work for free. That’s one reason he’s always paid his interns at least minimum wage. But there’s a more pragmatic reason.

“We just thought that it made more sense to pay people something upfront rather than deal with the possibility that we’d have legal issues later,” Bartakovics says.

Still, the Student Intern Network’s Zachary Huhn says an unpaid opportunity is better than no opportunity. Students may just have to get creative.

“I’ve seen students crowd-fund their internships, collect donations from family and friends, work a part time job,” he says.

]]>Mon, 12 May 2014 10:03:08 GMTWhen 4 out of 5 teachers are whitehttp://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/education/when-4-out-5-teachers-are-white

Close to 50 percent of U.S. public school students are young people of color, but 4 out of 5 teachers are white, according to new research from the Center for American Progress and the National Education Association. Education researchers say a lack of diversity among educators leaves children less prepared for the increasingly diverse workplaces they'll be entering.

Researchers say there are several reasons for the dearth of diverse teachers, among them, a changing workplace landscape that is more inclusive of African-Americans, Hispanics and others.

Gray said when she was growing up in Texarkana, TX, in the 1950s, "You either became a teacher (which was respected), a funeral parlor director, you worked as a railroad porter, (where you got good tips), or maybe you went to work for the post office. In terms of economics, that's where you went in order to provide a step and a ladder up for your family."

These days, Gray says, there's simply more opportunity for African-Americans. "The next generation, my daughter, that generation, they're lawyers, doctors. Economically, in the next generation, I can do all kinds of things. I don't have to be a teacher."

Gray, who speaks warmly of the supportive and nurturing environment provided by the African-American teachers of her youth, nonetheless, says that her horizons as a child might have been broadened had she been taught by staff of different backgrounds.

"It is important in a population of students for the 21st centrury and beyond, we're moving toward a global world, that students see teachers of all backgrounds," Gray said.

Ulrich Boser, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, who co-authored a new report on diversity among educators, says that in many schools today, the teaching workforce "look[s] like it meandered out of the 1950s." Boser says diversity is important for two very crucial reasons.

"Research shows students of color do much better in terms of academic outcomes with teachers of color," Boser said. "They see them as role models. Student achievement, graduation rates, test scores all go up."

And for white students, having non-white teachers is a critical part of preparing for the increasingly diverse, "real" world.

"It's important for white students to engage with Hispanic teachers, to engage with Black teachers," Boser said, "because the world of work is a world in which we have to engage and cooperate and communicate with people who come from different backgrounds."

]]>Mon, 05 May 2014 21:31:02 GMTWhy the unpaid internship may be on its way outhttp://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/education/why-unpaid-internship-may-be-its-way-out

Just how crucial is a summer internship these days? When I stopped by Columbia University in New York recently, almost every student I talked to either had one lined up—or was working on it.

“It’s almost as required as the core classes here,” says freshman Keenan Piper. “If you’re not taking internships over the summer, you’re just getting behind.”

Piper, a pre-med student from Seattle, plans to do a research internship back home at the University of Washington—most likely unpaid. Junior Ethan Ling has scored a coveted paid gig in Hong Kong, after working for free last summer—full time—at a venture capital firm.

“I just had to do it just to beef up my resume,” Ling says. “I think in the job market you just have to do what you have to do to get a job at the end of the day.”

“I tend to sort of breeze over the ones that don’t pay, because I don’t think it’s really fair," says freshman Brittney Wade, who’s looking for a summer position in public relations. “Yes, we’re doing it for an experience, and that is valuable to us, but I don’t think there should be free labor enforced when it comes to internships.”

A lot of people are starting to agree. Last spring a federal judge threw water on the long tradition of the unpaid internship. He ruled that Fox Searchlight Pictures had broken the law by failing to pay interns who did the work of paid employees. The ruling forced employers everywhere to rethink their policies.

“Any time you post an ad for an unpaid internship, you’re writing ‘Poor people need not apply’ in big letters at the top,” says Mikey Franklin, founder of the Fair Pay Campaign to end unpaid internships.

If the fairness argument hasn’t been persuasive, the threat of lawsuits has been. Magazine publisher Condé Nast just settled a suit brought by some of its former unpaid interns. Rather than start paying, the company shut down its internship program altogether. Many other companies—from Viacom to the New York Times to the nonprofit Lean In—have opted to pay at least minimum wage.

And here’s where I have to come clean. Though Marketplace pays all of its interns, I myself hired one last summer to work—unpaid—on my own project, a documentary film. Like many interns, she got college credit. But that practice is under fire, too. Recently Columbia announced it would no longer give its undergraduates credit for internships. Other schools have stepped up their oversight.

“All that Columbia giving this credit did was enable employers to offer unpaid internships and say that, ‘Well they get credit, so it must be legal,’” says senior Peter Sterne.

Sterne has done his share of internships, at the Columbia Journalism Review and the New York Observer. He says the fact that he could afford to work unpaid—thanks, Mom and Dad—gave him an unfair advantage. He now runs a website tracking who pays interns and how much. As more companies start paying, he says, there will probably be fewer positions to go around.

“It’s going to be more difficult to get an internship,” he says. “If they have to pay minimum wage, then it’s going to be much more selective.”

That may be happening already. NACE, the group of colleges and employers, tracks internships in an annual survey. The group’s Edwin Koch says typically he sees at least a 5 percent increase in positions every year, even when the economy’s stagnant.

This year?

“We saw no real increase in the number of internships available this year as opposed to last year, whereas there should be a substantial increase at this point,” Koch says.

That has colleges nervous. They’re under a lot of pressure to produce employable graduates who land good jobs. Several higher education groups recently filed a brief in a pair of intern lawsuits now on appeal in New York, arguing that there’s still a place for the unpaid internship.

“The internships tend to be of such value to students that the fact that they are not receiving a paycheck is somewhat secondary to the value of the experience,” says Ada Meloy, general counsel of the American Council on Education, one of the groups that weighed in.

]]>Mon, 05 May 2014 18:17:13 GMTA long road from foster care to collegehttp://www.marketplace.org/topics/wealth-poverty/education/long-road-foster-care-college

Lucero Noyola's high school GPA - a flat 2.0 - reflects a life in two halves. When she started high school, Noyola was a troubled kid who cut class, experimented with drugs, and had been hauled to court for assaulting a classmate.

When she finished high school, life was far from perfect, but she was earnings straight As and was on a path toward the University of Southern California.

Noyola's parents, immigrants from Mexico, worked full-time. They were often out of the house and in their absence, there was chaos. When her older brother entered high school, he started bringing home friends - boys and young men who used the family's house as a place to hang out.

"I guess our home was attractive because there were no parents around, and they would hang out there and do what they didn't want to do around their own parents," Noyola said.

That included drugs. By the time she was 16, Noyola had experimented with pot, methamphetamines and cocaine. She and her twin sister, following in the footsteps of the young men around them, solved their problems by fighting.

"We were not dramatic girls, like the rest of the girls," Noyola said. "All that relational aggression - it was just different for us. It was physical."

Her early teen years were a blur of juvenile halls, house arrests, and, once, a camp for troubled youths, where Noyola remembers with horror, that even clothing was communal.

"The articles of clothing were so disgusting," Noyola said. "They were re-used. People would fight over new underwear and pretty jackets. It was gross and dirty there."

At sixteen, Lucero was removed from her parents care and sent to a group home. Her time in foster care would prove life-changing. At the Crittenton home in Fullerton, California, Lucero says she was, for the first time, treated like an individual who needed guidance, rather than a criminal. She was given her own room, and space for her belongings.

Joyce Capelle, CEO of Crittenton Services, says the organization understands there is sometimes a disconnect between the front that a troubled young person puts on, and what's actually going on inside.

"It's not unusual to have a really tough-talking sixteen-year-old who trash talks and wants to be all of that and makes it sound like they're forty, but at Christmas the thing they want is Cinderalla sheets," said Capelle.

At Crittenton, the young residents were taken on field trips. Noyola remembers one, in particular, to the campus of California State University, Fullerton. "The campus was gorgeous," Noyola said. "I had never been anywhere big, pretty, fancy. I had never realized people had lives like that."

Noyola began applying herself in school and took a job as a campus aide at the group home. When she returned to her parents' house, life was far from perfect, but she had a new goal: to improve her image.

"People see you by who you are on paper," Noyola said. "A lot of the adults I was around would have a paper in front of them, and judge me by that. I was motivated, at that point, to turn it around."

At eighteen, after she gave birth to her daugther, Lucero's father took her to apply for aid. There, she had something like an ephiphany.

"I was sitting there and I realized there were a lot of homeless people," she said. "And I was like, no. I don't want to be like this. I don't want to live like this. They're just going to be giving me two hundred dollars a month and some bus tokens and food stamps. See what life you can live with this. I didn't want it."

She asked her father to pick her up and take her instead to East Los Angeles college, a two-year school.

Her grades in community college were high enough to ensure her entry into the University of Southern California. Once there, she found that no one at the private university was familiar with the paperwork needed to ensure she could continue recieving TANF support while in school. That support was critical in helping her to afford daycare. So, she turned to Trojan Guardian Scholars, an on-campus support group at USC that helps former foster youth transition to life in college. Advisors with the Trojan Guardian Scholars helped her get the necessary paperwork.

Today, Noyola has a 3.5 GPA, a double major in pyschology and sociology, and a summer research internship in Dubai, studying migrant domestic workers. If she can continue to juggle motherhood, work, and her finances, she'd like to enter a PhD program. As for her future plans, she says, "Professor Noyola" sounds pretty good to her.

]]>Mon, 05 May 2014 09:18:34 GMTNew York parents opt out of high stakes tests http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/education/new-york-parents-opt-out-high-stakes-tests

Last year, Amelia Costigan watched as her twin sons and their fourth-grade classmates prepared for the new state tests. It was the first year New York’s assessments were based on the Common Core, the nationally standardized curricula that many states have adopted in recent years. And, a lot was at stake in New York. The kids literally worried themselves sick.

“My kids had trouble sleeping,” Costigan says. “Other kids had stomach aches. Kids were going to the doctors, and the doctors were saying it looked like it was stress from the test.”

The tests determined whether her sons advanced to the next grade, or got into a top middle school. Scores also played into teacher evaluations and school rankings. This year, Costigan and the parents of eight other kids at her school decided they didn’t want their kids to participate.

“It was a hard decision that some of them had. They cried. They worried they weren’t going to go to graduation, but in the end, all 10 kids opted out,” she says.

Parents’ groups estimate about 1,000 kids in New York City won’t be taking the Common Core assessments this year. Statewide, it’s about 35,000. Those numbers are hard to verify and they represent just a tiny fraction of the total number of kids sitting down for the math tests this week.

But opting out is the most drastic—and visible—part of a growing protest movement in New York and nationwide. Parents, teachers, and other critics have been holding rallies, trying to put an end to the standardized tests.

Dan Bobkoff/Marketplace

At a rally in Lower Manhattan last week, Liz Rosenberg says her fourth grade daughter wasn’t scared of the tests at first.

“She was super psyched to take it,” she says.

But Rosenberg was anything but psyched. Part of her objection is that questions and answers are not released after the test, so it’s hard for kids to know what they don’t know. She convinced her daughter that the tests are a bad idea. This year, she’s opting out.

“It’s important to stand up. It’s important to talk back,” Rosenberg says.

Many teachers and critics believe the math is confusing and the English questions are too hard. Fourth graders are being asked to assess middle school level reading, some say.

“We felt the questions did not actually assess whether children were reading with understanding, which we thought was really important to assess,” says Elizabeth Phillips, principal of PS 321 in Brooklyn.

She’s not anti-testing or against the Common Core, but she say seeing the English exams turned her off.

Phillips was also concerned that so much was riding on these tests. Like other critics, she held protests. And, to some degree they worked.

“Up until a few weeks ago, there really was a lot at stake,” she says.

Dan Bobkoff/Marketplace

Recently, New York officials scrambled to lower the stakes. No longer will test scores go on students’ permanent records. And, they won’t be used as the major determinant of whether kids go onto the next grade.

Officials think that change will go a long way to placate many nervous parents.

“Knowing that the state test will only be used as one of multiple factors has eased some of those concerns,” says Emily Weiss, senior executive director of performance at New York City Department of Education

At some point, if too few students take the tests, some schools could lose funds.

That’s still far off, but with opposition to the tests mounting, New York’s fight could be coming to a state near you.

A writing professor at MIT has developed a computer program that writes a college essay in one second, after you input a few key words and it actually scores pretty well on an online grading system meant for actual human student writing.

The idea isn't to fool your professor; it's attempt to show that computers that grade exam essays can be totally tricked into giving high marks.

Les Perelmen, a recently-retired MIT professor who worked with students to develop the program, generated a sample for Marketplace on the subject of the future of education and technology. The essay begins:

"Teaching has not, and no doubt never will be exemplary. Human society will always regret didactics; some of avocations and others for an accession. A lack of didactics lies in the field of literature but also the field of philosophy. Teaching is the most cordially arrogant trope of mankind. "

What does it actually mean? We're not sure, but it merited a whopping 5.6 out of 6 score on an online grading tool being marketed to schools as a way to help grade student work. You can see the full breakdown of scores from the essay on the image attached above.

The full essay generated by Perelmen's program for Marketplace can be read below if you have the stomach to make it through the whole thing:

Teaching has not, and no doubt never will be exemplary. Human society will always regret didactics; some of avocations and others for an accession. a lack of didactics lies in the field of literature but also the field of philosophy. Teaching is the most cordially arrogant trope of mankind.

Reiteration, especially for excess, masticates an interloper on exorbitantly but fallaciously truculent assassinations by instruction. If advocates renege or assure reprobation, gluttony that is situationally boisterous but is risible, sapient, and soporific with educational activity can be more reprovingly entreated. Additionally, technology, often at an utterance, can be the commencement. In my experience, all of the reprobates to our personal consequence of the dictator we countenance delineate the escapades in question. Even so, armed with the knowledge that the recondite disruption encounters establishment, most of the organisms for my precinct assent. Our personal scrutinization to the contradiction we placate howls. Education which depreciates all of the ruminations might divisively be a juggernaut on our personal sanction with the allusion we propagate as well. The countenance of diagnoses may be legerdemain but is belligerent yet somehow effortless, not cornucopia that tantalizes provocation and allocates inspections. In my theory of knowledge class, none of the agronomists at our personal scenario by the exposition we ponder embark and anesthetize reprimands which observe the response. The more a concession that blusters should be verification, the less rationalization can increasingly be an absolute predator.

As I have learned in my semiotics class, technology is the most fundamental affront of humankind. Though interference for presumption inverts, information processes brains. The same pendulum may process two different orbitals to process an orbital. The plasma is not the only thing the brain reacts; it also receives neutrinoes for conjecture with technology. Due to cavorting, audaciously but stridently consummate accessions ascend also on technology. a substantiated education changes the intercession at education.

The appendage, frequently to a tyro, taunts educational activity. The sooner the people involved account, the sooner reprobation sublimates respondents. Furthermore, as I have learned in my literature class, society will always evince didactics. Our personal exile of the adjuration we augur will be contretemps with assemblies and may presumptuously be compensation. The casuistry might, still yet, be unintentional in the way we insist or enlightenment the awkwardly and despicably predatory recrudescence but presume avocations. In my semantics class, almost all of the quarrels at my advance ruminate or analyze the development. a quantity of engineering is slight for our personal postulate on the civilization we accuse as well. The axiom aggregates dislocation, not a commencement. In my experience, many of the lamentations by our personal confluence at the account we denigrate diagnose taunts. The less palaver that culminates is petite in the extent to which we fascinate most of the adherents for the realm of reality and insinuate or should tenaciously be an accumulation, the more reprobates masticate the accumulation of community.

Instruction with agreements will always be an experience of human society. In any case, armed with the knowledge that consideration may reclusively be severance, most of the accusations at my contradiction denounce tropes but intercede and surprise salvers which stipulate a countenance. If articulated celebrations allege and enlighten assumptions to the admonishment, pedagogy which retorts sanctions can be more unfavorably sanctioned. Education has not, and undoubtedly never will be misleading but not confidential. Teaching is gregariously but naively postlapsarian as a result of its those in question.

What would happen if the government moved away from financial aid for college students and more towards work study? Marketplace economics contributor Chris Farrell joins Morning Report host David Brancaccio to make his case for growing work study. Click on the audio player above to hear more.

College admissions rates across the country hit some all-time lows this year. Stanford University, for instance, took only around five percent of applicants. In response to the crazy numbers game of college admissions, schools are growing their wait lists and using them in some surprising ways.

You may think a wait list is for applicants who aren't quite as good as those admitted outright. But it's not that simple. Chris Munoz, the vice president for enrollment at Rice University, says the differences between candidates accepted and those on the wait list "are so subtle and so nuanced." It is less about who is "better" or "worse," and more about the college making sure it can get the exact student body it wants.

Schools stock wait lists with all kinds of applicants -- A-plus students, athletes, candidates who can pay full tuition. Munoz says wait-listing students is like choosing back-ups for a sports team. You want one for every position."Sometimes you need quarterbacks," he says, "and sometimes you need tight ends. So it's luck."

In the end, the wait list comes down to "yield." This is the percentage of students who will accept the college's acceptance. Schools use wait lists to manage the uncertainty of who will actually say yes when admitted. The yield percentage isn't just important for hitting enrollment targets, it has big financial implications.

Over the years, yield numbers have come to affect a school's ranking and bond rating. Low yields will pull down the rank and make it harder to secure financing. To keep yield high, colleges want as many of the students they initially admit to come.

For the most elite colleges, this is less of a problem. Few applicants are going to turn down an Ivy League college or top liberal arts school. But for other institutions it's not so easy. Some schools try to predict which applicants will actually say yes by factoring in a student's "demonstrated interest." This includes things like campus visits and alumni interviews. Other schools, however, are suspected of playing the numbers game a bit more aggressively.

There are rumors that some colleges actually wait-list applicants who seem too good to be true. Admissions offices realize certain top-notch candidates have a high chance of getting in somewhere higher up the rankings food chain. By putting them on the wait list, the admissions office can see if the applicant gets rejected by other schools and comes back begging to be accepted. This way, colleges can catch some prized applicants without risking their yield numbers. Basically, a school doesn't want to be used as safety and then ditched for a first choice.

Admissions consultant Annie Roskin thinks some of her clients may have been wait-listed in this way.

"The thing is you don't know what a wait list means," she says, "kids don't know." Maybe too many quarterbacks applied that year. Did they show enough demonstrated interest? Perhaps their applications just weren't strong enough. Or, the school wanted to soften the blow of rejection and gave them "courtesy wait lists"—a tactic sometimes used for students related to wealthy donors or who have alumni relatives. Who knows?

Katy Murphy is the president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. She says the wait list "is purgatory for a kid, basically."

Increased use of the wait lists are part of the vicious admissions cycle. Acceptance rates are falling. That panics kids into applying to more and more schools, which drives acceptance rates further down. All of this lowers yield numbers and encourages colleges to use the wait list. "It's our own admissions march madness vortex," Murphy says.

School rankings fuel all this madness. Murphy says it's part of the increasing commodification of higher education—this idea that college is a product that will predictably deliver things like great jobs and happiness. The rankings establish a brand. They suggest some kind of quantification—the better the number, the higher the return on investment.

Murphy says the reduction of schools to numbers drives ambitious applicants to pursue a small group of elite colleges, not because they are the best fits, but because they are the most effectively branded. She says, "I think everybody would be better off if they didn't believe that there were only thirty colleges that were good colleges."

If that doesn't change, expect more kids to be stuck in admissions limbo on the wait list.

At Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., about ten students — all women but one — sit at a round table discussing Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey.”

The 88-year-old college has a reputation for doing things differently. Most classes are small seminars like this one. There are no majors. Students do a lot of independent projects. And grades aren’t as important as the long written evaluations professors give every student at the end of every semester. It’s no surprise, then, that professor James Horowitz is skeptical of any uniform college rating system, like the one being proposed by the Obama administration.

“The goals that we are trying to achieve in instructing our students might be very different from what the University of Chicago or many other schools or a state school or a community college might be striving to achieve,” Horowitz says.

The Obama administration is due out this spring with details of its controversial plan to rate colleges on measures like value and affordability. The idea is that if students can compare schools on cost, graduation rates and even how much money students earn after they graduate — colleges might have to step up their game. Especially if, as proposed, poor performers risk losing access to federal financial aid.

All that, naturally, makes colleges just a bit nervous. Sarah Lawrence is fighting back with its own way of measuring value. The faculty came up with six abilities they think every Sarah Lawrence graduate should have. They include the ability to write and communicate effectively, to think analytically, and to accept and act on critique.

“We don’t believe that there’s like 100 things you should know when you graduate,” says computer science professor Michael Siff, who helped develop the tool. “It’s much more about are you a good learner? Do you know how to enter into a new domain and attack it with an open mind, but also an organized mind?”

Faculty advisors can use the results to track students’ progress over time and help them address any weaknesses. A student who’s struggling with communication could take class with a lot of oral presentations, for example, or make an appointment at the campus writing center.

But Siff says the tool is also about figuring out what the college can do better.

“This tool will allow us to assess ourselves as an institution,” he says. “Are we imparting what we believe to be these critical abilities?”

So how is the school doing? So far there are only data for two semesters, but on every measure seniors do better than juniors. Sophomores do better than freshmen.

Starting next fall, advisors will meet with their students at the beginning of each semester to talk over their progress. In sort of a trial run, Siff goes over the results so far with one of his advisees, junior Zachary Doege.

On a scale from “not yet developed” to “excellent,” he’s mostly at the top end. Doege says he likes seeing his own growth.

“I think the thing I like the most about this is just the fact that I can look back at how I was doing in previous semesters and sort of chart my own progress,” he says. “Not comparing me towards other students—just me to myself.”

That’s a different measure of the value of an education than, say, student loan debt or earnings after graduation — the sorts of things the Obama administration is considering as part of its ratings plan. Students and parents are right to ask if they’re getting their money’s worth, says the college’s president, Karen Lawrence. After financial aid, the average cost of a Sarah Lawrence education is almost $43,000 a year.

“People are worried about cost,” Lawrence says. “We understand that.”

And they’re worried about getting jobs after graduation. But she says the abilities that the new assessment measures—critical thinking and innovation and collaboration—are the same ones employers say they’re looking for.

“We think these are abilities that students are going to need both right after graduation and in the future, and so it could be an interesting model.”

One she hopes other schools will take a look at as they figure out how to answer the national debate about the value of college.

The six "critical abilities" that Sarah Lawrence College identified as skills that every graduate should have:

Ability to think analytically about the material.

Ability to express ideas effectively through written communication.

Ability to exchange ideas effectively through oral communication.

Ability to bring innovation to the work.

Ability to envisage and carry through a project independently, with appropriate guidance.

There is $62 billion in outstanding debt belonging to parents who’ve borrowed federal Parent PLUS loans to send their kids to school. The Department of Education is considering tightening the loans’ eligibility criteria, amid concern it’s been too easy for low- and moderate-income parents to get in over their heads.

But the last time it did that, it set off a firestorm.

The thing about Parent PLUS loans is they’re not based on income. Pass a credit check, and you can borrow up to the full cost of attendance. Parents don’t have to prove they can actually repay their loans.

“At the time, I was happy to get it,” says 56 year old Barbara Jones of Boston, who took out more than $100,000 in loans she now says she can’t afford.

“Because then if you didn’t get that, then what would you do?” she asks. “You know, how would you keep your child in school, how would you pay it if you didn’t have any other option than the Parent PLUS loan?”

Jones’s son graduated from Pace University last year. Now mother and son are both in debt for the same degree.

Of course, millions of parents take out PLUS loans; they’re a tool to promote college access. The average outstanding balance is $20,338, according to the Department of Education.

But policy analyst Rachel Fishman with the New America Foundation worries it’s too easy for low and moderate income families to borrow too much, as they try to give their kids a better life.

“That really puts the federal government in a dangerous position of telling them, ‘Sure you can do that,’” she says. “'You can mortgage your future. You’re really close to retirement and we can garnish your Social Security, but fine, we’re gonna to let you take on a loan for $20,000, $30,000 dollars.’”

“We absolutely don’t want parents to get in over their head,” says Cheryl Smith, who works with the United Negro College Fund. “That’s why we think there should be a counseling program. At the same time, we don’t think we should be paternalistic.”

UNCF helps minority students get to and through college. It also lobbies for the private historically black colleges and universities. HBCUs have a lot of low and moderate income students, and Smith says thousands were affected when the government toughened the credit check for Parent PLUS loans back in 2011. She says enrollment fell at some private HBCUs , and HBCUs generally lost millions in revenue, “Directly attributable to fewer students being able to get a Parent PLUS loan.”

Even though parents still don’t have to prove they can repay their PLUS loans, Smith says it’s now too hard to get one.

Still, the larger community is conflicted. Johnny Taylor heads the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which represents the publicly supported HBCUs. He thinks, at a certain point, Parent PLUS loans should be capped.

“Heretofore we have said to students, ‘Pick the school that you want to attend.’ And frankly the narrative may change to pick the school that you can afford to attend,” he says.

It’s a narrative unfolding within the Department of Education too, which is considering changes to the rules this spring.

Samantha Peterson is what you might call a "typical student" at the University of Baltimore.

"I am a junior-ish," she says, in between bites of a sandwich at the student center. "That means that I've been in school for a very long time."

Peterson has been in school—studying criminal justice—five or six years now, she says. Because she works, full-time, at a school cafeteria.

The University of Baltimore is like a lot of urban, public campuses. Most students here work, and more than half need to take remedial courses. That's partly why just 12 to 15 percent of students graduate in four years.

"The longer it takes for students to complete college, the more life gets in the way, and the less likely they are to graduate," says Dominique Raymond with the advocacy group Complete College America.

So starting in the fall, the University of Baltimore will offer new freshmen a deal. If they finish in four years, the last semester's tuition is on the house. At today's prices that's worth about $3,300 for in-state students.

President Bob Bogomolny expects the university to save money by getting students through faster. It could also attract more full-time students.

"If we can motivate a few students to have the advantage of finishing in four, to have less loans, to get into the workforce sooner, it's worth it to us," he says.

Nationally, just over half of college students finish in six years. Other schools are trying incentives like scholarships and loan forgiveness to encourage more students to attend full-time. The University of North Texas just approved a plan that gives students a fixed tuition rate and $4,000 discount if they finish in four years.

At the University of Baltimore, junior Blair Lee wishes the free semester deal had been around when he started.

"I was actually kind of excited when I heard that—a little jealous," he says. "I think it will give more people an incentive to finish faster and go on to possibly pursue graduate studies."

Lee is proof that money can be a powerful motivator. He's one of the rare students who expects to finish in four years—while working full time. He wants to avoid paying out-of-state tuition any longer than he has to.

A victory for privacy advocates in New York spells trouble for a national effort to track student data--everything from grades and test scores to disabilities and suspensions. The New York State Education Department has confirmed it will no longer store any student information with the non-profit inBloom. That makes New York the last big customer to drop out of an initiative backed by the Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation. Once boasting nine states as potential customers, the nonprofit group says it’s still talking with individual school districts around the country.

]]>Wed, 02 Apr 2014 21:07:32 GMTWhat's the ROI for a college degree?http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/education/whats-roi-college-degree

For example, a degree from Harvey Mudd College will cost you just under $229,500, according to Payscale’s fifth annual survey. But the return on that investment -- meaning how much money you’ll actually make because you attended Harvey Mudd -- is nearly $1 million dollars over 20 years.

Not surprisingly, engineering schools give the best return. But even the report's authors say future earnings shouldn't dictate a college choice.

"What we’re trying to say is make sure that you go to the right school for that choice that you’re making," says Katie Bardaro, the lead economist on the report.

At the same time, college admissions counselors says they're seeing colleges offer more job-focused degrees.

There are some new developments this week in the land of the MOOC. That’s shorthand for the "Massive Open Online Courses" that were supposed to transform higher education as we know it, bringing free education from the likes of Harvard and Stanford to you and me.

Meanwhile Coursera competitor edX has a new president from the business world -- former Vistaprint executive Wendy Cebula. The hires mark a new phase in the evolution of free online education as it tries to move beyond the initial hype -- and the inevitable backlash.

"Clearly there's a big jump between the credibility of two Stanford faculty members and someone who's a 20-year president of Yale University," says Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller. "I think this really makes clear that we are not out to put universities out of business -- have never been out to do that."

Six signs that MOOCs are growing up

by Marc Sollinger

MOOCs, or Massively Open Online Courses, are pretty much exactly what their acronym implies: college courses offered on the web that anyone can take. The actual format of the courses vary by what actual work is required and whether they're free or require payment. Critics say they’re overhyped. However you parse it, MOOCs are becoming a big deal. Here are six signs they’re growing up:

1. Ex-Yale president joins Coursera

Coursera is the largest provider of MOOCs, with 532 courses offered. And Richard C. Levin, who ran Yale for 20 years, will be it’s CEO. This development means Coursera will be led by someone with lots of ties the world of brick-and-mortar higher ed. This move could show that Coursera is looking to get at least some of its courses accredited. (So far, none of the schools that create content for Coursera actually offer credit for courses taken.)

2. Thomas Friedman thinks MOOCs might save the world

Well, perhaps not save the world. But Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, does think that “nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty.” It’s not just Friedman that thinks MOOCs might change education -- they’ve been praised in Al Jazeera, elsewhere in the New York Times, and Wired. Though MOOCs have had their share of criticism, the idea that they could democratize education is widely-held.

3. MOOCs go global

It’s not just U.S. colleges that are offering MOOCs. Universities in Finland, France, and Ireland also have their own massive online courses. In the U.K. they’ve launched FutureLearn, which offers courses from 23 local universities. Part of the appeal of MOOCs is that anyone from across the globe can access them and increasingly, the courses can come from anywhere as well. In fact, one Harvard professor’s course was so popular in South Korea, he was invited to throw out the first pitch at a baseball game in that country.

4. Wharton puts its first year online

Last year, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the most prestigious business schools in the U.S., put much of its first-year MBA content online. Though you won’t get access to career services or an alumni network, and the courses aren’t actually for credit, you can still access all the information presented to a beginning Wharton student. This interest in MOOCs is not atypical of top-tier business schools, with seven of Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s Top 10 Business Schools experimenting with them.

5. MOOCs help train physician’s assistants in Ghana

A team at the University of New Mexico has partnered with Central University College in Ghana to use MOOCs to train physician’s assistants. The project is still in its early stages. It involves buying tablets for 30 students studying to be doctor’s aides in rural Ghana and using the tablets to train the students while they help people in their communities. Though it’s not a standard MOOC, according to the University of New Mexico’s Charlotte Gunawardena, it demonstrates the potential of the technology.

6. Georgia Tech offers master's degree through a MOOC

Though MOOCs can broadcast a college’s content, most universities don’t offer accreditation for completing one. So it was big news when Georgia Tech offered a Master's in Computer Science using massively open online course technology. The master's degree cost $6,600, cheap compared to the $44,000 Georgia Tech charges for residential studies, but far more than the $49 Coursera charges for its courses.

President Obama will be giving the commencement speech at UC Irvine this June. You’d hope the President would have valuable advice for new graduates. But Jeffrey Papa, President of SimpsonScarborough, a higher education marketing firm, wants everyone to remember that “higher Education is a business.”

So, what would be the value, and cost, of a Presidential speech at your school?

VALUE: $1,000,000 worth of marketing

Jeffrey Papa of SimpsonScarborough says schools can spend up to a million dollars on a marketing campaign for just one project.

VALUE: Lots of media coverage

There were over 400 stories about UC Irvine’s commencement this Thursday, with many more coming before now and the actual event in June.

VALUE: Street cred, prestige

Dan Hurley with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities says it's unlikely the school could find another speaker who'd be as much of a media magnet as President Obama. But academic institutions need to strike a delicate balance between looking like a prestigious institution, and still getting the word out.

COST: $1,200,000 on stadium

UC Irvine had to get a stadium large enough to accommodate its special graduation.

COST: Thousands on security

Though the school isn't sure what the exact tab is, security for POTUS is figured in to its $1.2 million stadium deal. Dan Hurley says while the White House isn't charging the school, there's a lot of advance work with security detail that has an institution’s staff running hard in the days leading up to a visit.

The President needs a good speech. Help him out: What’s the best commencement speech advice you’ve ever heard?

Wall Street is starting to lose a war it has long dominated: The battle for talent. Elite schools that once sent hordes of brainy undergrads to big banks aren’t sending quite so many these days. A growing number of America’s top students are joining tech companies to seek their fortunes, or choosing to improve others’ fortunes in the non-profit world.

There’s a snapshot of what’s happening nationally at Princeton University, one of Wall Street’s favorite hunting grounds. As one of the America’s most selective schools, the university has already done some of recruiters’ work for them by bringing the nation’s brightest to campus. Year after year, banks and consulting firms arrive on campus to make their pitch. Students don ties and pantsuits for interviews, and not just economics majors. The banks pull from across campus.

Any bank recruiter would love to snag senior Malik Jackson. Wall Street prizes Ivy League athletes and Jackson plays quarterback. That means there’s a front row seat reserved for him on the train that has long carried Princeton grads to banking.

But he’s not taking it.

He’s going back to his hometown of Jacksonville, Florida to teach middle school social studies via Teach For America.

“As a student body, we all have such distinct interests,” Jackson explains. “It would be a disservice if all those interests were only focused on one field.”

He’s one of a growing number of students resisting the lure of finance and choosing to work in the non-profit sector, a big change from years past.

“I saw just about everyone headed to banks and consulting firms,” says Wendy Kopp, who graduated from Princeton in 1989.

Seeing so many of her classmates students sucked into finance frustrated her. She felt their talents could be put to better use elsewhere. That led her to starting Teach For America, the non-profit which steers talented undergrads to teach in needy classrooms. The program has grown rapidly, drawing heavily from Princeton and other selective schools. Kopp is now CEO of Teach For All, a global network of educational non-profits.

Non-profits got a big assist from Wall Street during the financial crisis. Banks blew up, cut jobs, and students questioned working for the firms that wrecked the world’s economy. Occupy Wall Street grew popular on campuses. When JPMorgan’s recruiters came to Princeton in 2011, a group of Occupy protesters disrupted the meeting. It wouldn’t be the only such protest.

“When I was a freshman, a lot of my upperclassmen friends would tell me about how their friends were going into finance and consulting,” says junior Damaris Miller, one of the Occupy protesters disrupting that recruiting session. “I find that a lot of my friends are not.”

Among Princeton’s 2006 graduates, 45 percent with full-time jobs worked in finance, according the Princeton University Office of Career Services, which surveys where students land a few months after graduation. That number nosedived after the financial crash. By the time the class of 2013 had entered the world, only 24 percent of those with full-time jobs were in finance. (The University’s data include finance and insurance in one category.)

[Note: For the Classes of 2006-2010 there was a 3-month survey follow-up period following graduation. In 2011, the follow-up period was changed to 6-months after graduation.]

Figuring out what students want and how to get them there is the challenge for Pulin Sanghvi, who runs Princeton’s career services office. A veteran of both Morgan Stanley and McKinsey, he understands that today’s students aren’t as easily swayed by the giants of banking and consulting that have traditionally had dibs on elite graduates.

He says today’s students want jobs that have meaning to them. That can mean non-profits, but not necessarily. The day Sanghvi showed me around his offices, Kayak was there interviewing students. Tech companies and startups are scooping up many who might have gone to Wall Street. The percentage of grads finding work at tech companies is soaring as the numbers for finance sag.

“Many [students] are getting excited by the opportunity to disrupt industries, and create new enterprises, and build organizations that may create thousands of jobs,” Sanghvi says.

Part of the reason banks had such a tight grip on elite schools for so long was their hefty recruiting budgets. Many students who weren’t sure what to do just defaulted into finance. Now, they’re going elsewhere.

Plenty still go to Wall Street, of course. Those who are most certain about it gathered recently for an evening meeting of the Princeton Corporate Finance Club. Sophomore economics major Darwin Li is president. Though most undergrads do just one finance internship after junior year, he did his first straight out of high school. He’s now looking ahead to his third, and says he already has a summer offer from a hedge fund.

Li doesn’t come across as careerist or greedy, just genuinely passionate about finance. Someone who should be a banker.

“Growing up I’ve been very numbers oriented, competing in math competitions. I’ve had a very quantitative mindset. I played chess,” he says. “The thought process to accomplish those things is pretty much the same thought process used in a lot of financial fields.”

The campus doesn’t give the impression of disdain for students who go to work for banks. It’s more of a suspicion of those who seem to be doing it for the wrong reasons.

“I wouldn’t say that people are very antagonistic toward people who are pursuing careers in finance, but are more antagonistic to people who originally give the impression that they wanted to work for a non-profit and then switch over,” explains Prianka Misra, an associate editor of the student paper’s opinion section. “It seems like their intentions are entirely at odds with each other.”

Soon-to-be teacher Malik Jackson has no problem with friends going into finance, tech, non-profits or whatever, as long as they’re following a passion, not just a routine.

“You could be a company man and that is totally cool,” he says. “Or you could maybe start your own company. Or you could maybe just try to make the world better. There are so many ways to do it.”

Wall Street is freaked out about elite students passing it by. Banks are changing their recruiting pitch and work environments to compete. But it may be the students they can easily get are the ones who really want to do banking. That could be good for the banks. It certainly seems good for the students.